I am currently reading Markus Bockmuehl’s Seeing the Word: Refocusing New Testament Study for Marianne Meye Thomson’s course on New Testament Research Methods. It is both insightful and witty. One of his points especially stood out for me while I was reading today, particularly considering a previous post of mine. Bockmuehl is addressing the fragmentation of New Testament studies, in which each area of the discipline goes about its business without regard to the others. He then focuses in upon the infiniteness of publications within all of NT subfields since the time of C. H. Dodd:

By any standard it is now impossible to keep up with the sheer quantity of publications, increased exponentially by two and a half decades of word-processing technology. Jorge Luis Borges’s famous short story ‘The Library of Babel,’ first published before World War II, has never seemed more eerily prophetic than in the digital age. The ‘publish or perish’ mentality, long since dreaded especially by junior scholars, has become an all-encompassing output culture that is at once wholly unrealistic in its expectations and encouraging of staggering superficiality in its Diktat to leave no thought unpublished. In Britain, these effects are further aggravated by a goverment-imposed ‘research assessment’ culture, whose obsession with the regular appraisal of individual ‘outputs’ leaves the very survival of some departments hostage to an intellectual short-termism biased against the traditional testing and maturing over time of research projects large or small. (33-4, emphasis mine)

“To leave no thought unpublished.” That sure brings biblioblogging (or any other kind of blogging) to my mind. I don’t think that biblioblogging is the next technological revolution in New Testament studies, but rather it is another symptom of that “output culture” to which Bockmuehl refers. As I read this book and take this course, I will be thinking about my purpose in pursuing New Testament studies. What voice will I find as I walk towards academia? How can I simply be real without getting sucked into the “‘publish or perish’ mentality”? They are hard “identity” kinds of questions and now is that exciting time when I especially need to be asking them.